Wouldn't be nice to load your sim and find the scenery representing a plausible season, based on location and period of the year?
What about having an october with colored leafes and naked trees in winter?
Well actually this could be already accomplished using existing freeware libraries, but..
- what about having a snow coverage depending on season and distance from the poles?
- what about having ground snow only if within certain temperature ranges or with ongoing precipitations?
Four Seasons is a freeware plugin which scope is driving the changing of seasons from a scenery point of view.
The plugin is half of what you need, the second half are compatible sceneries.
Since this plugin is based on existing freeware sceneries, you have to modify these sceneries in order to make them compatible.
This isn't a plug & play software, you should spend some of your time reading and trying (exploring I'd prefer to say). Please do not expect full support for installing the plugin and the related libraries. Other than programming this software and releasing it for free, I'd prefer to spend my time with my family and cultivating my hobbies. I hope you understand it. ;-)
Note: Don't be scared, these modifications usually consist in changing 1 or 2 lines of text in a file called library.txt
- It estimates the season appearence and exposes a single dataref with a value representing the season.
- If a scenery is binded (through a REGION_DREF directive) to this dataref it will react accordingly (the plugin will force a scenery reload to make it happens).
- You set a place and/or a date for you aircraft and it tells the sceneries to reload with the correct set of textures
- Python 2.7.x (https://www.python.org/downloads/)
- Pyhton Interface Plugin by Sandy Barbour (http://www.xpluginsdk.org/python_interface.htm)
- Seasons Library by einstein (https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/29015-seasons-dataref-driven-libraries/)
- Seasons Spring by madmaxland (https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/35641-seasons-spring-v10/&page=2&tab=comments#comment-213081)
- Seasonal Fall Ground Textures by madmaxland (https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/35658-seasonal-fall-ground-textures/)
- Seasonal Winter Ground Textures by madmaxland (https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/35680-seasonal-winter-ground-textures/)
Table of Contents:
- Instructions for using the seasons sceneries under XP11 (without the plugin)
- Making the sceneries compatible with Four Seasons
Taken and adapted with permission of crisk73 from this post.
-
If your sceneries are already working with XP11 or you are using XP10, you can skip this step.
-
Since we don't need all the folders inside the original seasons packages, you could read this section and apply the changes only to the relevant directories (You'll find which in the next section)
The original post is referred to the "Seasons Library by einstein", here I'm also including "Seasons Spring by madmaxland"
A few notes:
1. Making a backup of all these files is always a good rule.
2. You won't need all the folders inside the seasons packages, but here we explain how to change them all
3. Summer is never mentioned because summer textures are the default ones.
If you have uncompressed all the sceneries packages, these are the folders you should end with:
- Seasonal Fall N
- Seasonal Snow N
- Seasonal Snow ND
- Seasons_assets
- Seasons_N_Autumn
- Seasons_N_Spring
- Seasons_N_Winter1
- Seasons_N_Winter2
- Seasons_Runways
- Seasons_S_Autumn
- Seasons_S_Winter
- Autumn
- Autumn_opensceneryx
- Autumn_R2
- Autumn_w2xp
- Seasons_N_Autumn
- Seasons_S_Autumn
- Winter_NS_R2
- Winter_w2xp
- WinterNS
- WinterNS_opensceneryx
- Seasons_N_Winter1
- Seasons_N_Winter2
- Seasons_S_Winter
- SpringNS_opensceneryx
- SpringNS
- Spring_w2xp
- Spring_NS_R2
- Seasons_N_Spring
4) In each folder open the file library.txt with a text editor (notepad is ok but I'd suggest notepad++) and substitute the following strings:
- "../Seasons_assets/" (without commas)
- "../Season _assets/" (different from the previous one since it has a tab before the character "_")
Example:
The block
###### Winter NS forests
EXPORT lib/g8/broad_cld_dry.for ../Seasons_assets/WinterNS/Win_NS_broad_cld_dry.for
EXPORT lib/g8/broad_cld_rain.for ../Seasons_assets/WinterNS/Win_NS_broad_cld_rain.for
EXPORT lib/g8/broad_cld_sdry.for ../Seasons_assets/WinterNS/Win_NS_broad_cld_sdry.for
Should become
###### Winter NS forests
EXPORT lib/g8/broad_cld_dry.for WinterNS/Win_NS_broad_cld_dry.for
EXPORT lib/g8/broad_cld_rain.for WinterNS/Win_NS_broad_cld_rain.for
EXPORT lib/g8/broad_cld_sdry.for WinterNS/Win_NS_broad_cld_sdry.for
First we have to choose only 1 folder per season winter. If you are starting with the following directories:
- Seasonal Fall N
- Seasonal Snow N
- Seasonal Snow ND
- Seasons_N_Autumn
- Seasons_N_Spring
- Seasons_N_Winter1
- Seasons_N_Winter2
- Seasons_S_Autumn
- Seasons_S_Winter
After all this work You should end up with these:
- Seasonal Fall
- Seasonal Snow
- Seasons_Autumn
- Seasons_Spring
- Seasons_Winter
So..
- Make a backup if needed
- Rename "Seasonal Fall N" in "Seasonal Fall"
- Rename "Seasonal Snow N" in "Seasonal Snow"
- Rename "Seasons_N_Autumn" in "Seasons_Autumn"
- Rename "Seasons_N_Spring" in "Seasons_Spring"
- Rename "Seasons_N_Winter1" in "Seasons_Winter"
- Delete or move the others.
Now, in order to make these sceneries working with Four Seasons we have to modify again the file library.txt.
Inside each library.txt you'll find (in the first part or header of the file) two directives:
REGION_BITMAP
REGION_DREF
We have to comment these directives putting a "#" as the first character of each line. Then we have to insert 2 other directives:
REGION_ALL
REGION_DREF (followed by the correct dataref)
Here I have to explain how Four Seasons injects (more or less) the season into these sceneries.
Four Season exposes a custom dataref called "nm/four_seasons/season".
This dataref can assume the following values:
- 10 (Season=Spring)
- 20 (Season=Summer)
- 30 (Season=Fall)
- 40 (Season=Winter without ground snow)
- 45 (Season=Winter with ground snow)
- 50 (Season=Deep Winter) (Only working with Terramax compatible sceneries)
Let's say we want to adapt the "Season Spring" package. All we have to do is:
- Open the file "Seasons_Spring\library.txt"
- Comment REGION_BITMAP
- Add the REGION_ALL as described here above.
- Insert the following REGION_DREF:
REGION_DREF nm/four_seasons/season == 10
That's to say, "Activate this scenery if the season dataref is equal to 'Spring'"
This is an excerpt of the header after these changes:
A
800
LIBRARY
##### Seasonal forests and trees
##### By Richard Elliott
##### Version 1.3 12 November 2015
###############################
##### Northern Hemisphere #####
##### Spring #####
###############################
REGION_DEFINE Nhem_spring
##### Seasonal region defined by white area of 360x180 bitmap. Each pixel represents 1x1 degree lat/long
#REGION_BITMAP Nhem.png
REGION_ALL
##### Spring in days starting from Jan 1st.
#REGION_DREF sim/time/local_date_days >= 91
#REGION_DREF sim/time/local_date_days <= 127
REGION_DREF nm/four_seasons/season == 10
##### Assign regional art assets
[...]
Proceed in the same way with
File to be modified:
- Seasons_Autumn\library.txt
- Seasonal_Fall\library.txt
REGION_DREF nm/four_seasons/season == 30
File to be modified:
- Seasons_Winter\library.txt
REGION_DREF nm/four_seasons/season == 40
File to be modified:
- Seasonal_Snow\library.txt
REGION_DREF nm/four_seasons/season >= 45
Note that here I've wrote "equal or grather than 45", so this scenery will be activated also with "winter deep".
At startup Four Season will calculate the season it considers accurate and feeds the datarefs accordingly.
After each aircraft repositioning or date change, it recalculates the season.
Note: Season changes will start and automatic reload of the scenery.
The control panel window shows the following elements:
- Determine season automatically: in this mode Four Seasons tries to caluculate an appropriate representation of the season
- Manual selections: select one of the listed seasons and press "Save&Apply", Four Season will maintain your choice.
- Feed terramax datarefs: Four Season will feed the datarefs used by Terramax compatible sceneries
- Force Refresh: Four Season will start a reload of the scenery and textures
- Refresh Season: Four Season will recalculate the season and start a reload of the scenery and textures if necessary
- Save&Apply: Four Season will save current settings and apply them. A reload of the scenery and textures could be started.
I do not own Terramax, but I've seen how it works and you can download UrbanMAXX (http://maxx-xp.com/urbanmaxx-v3-tm) for free and use it with Four Seasons, just enable the terramax option.
- Q: What's the difference between Seasons and Seasonal packages?
- A: Seasons changes objects while Seasonal acts on ground textures